Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Merry, Merry Month of May Indy Blogmeet!

The Best BBQ I've sampled north of the Mason-Dixon is the objective for this month's blogmeet (and delicious salmon for those who don't do the swine, although I have to say that Locally Grown Gardens' smoked pulled pork would make a rabbi kick a hole in a stained glass window...)

Obligatory Religious Food Joke:

Back in the days of mandatory meatless Fridays for Catholics, a Protestant moved into a largely Catholic neighborhood. His first Friday there, he drove the neighbors around the bend by throwing some ribeyes on the grill, their scent wafting about and tantalizing people dining on fish filets.

The next Friday, same thing.

On the third Friday, a delegation of neighborhood elders showed up on his doorstep and convinced him to renounce his Protestant ways. Water was sprinkled. "You were born a Protestant, you were raised a Protestant, and now you're a Catholic."

On the fourth Friday, just as everybody settled down to their dinner of whitefish and fries, the scent of seared beef floated over the neighborhood. Outraged, the leading lights of the village ran down to the new guy's house and peered over his fence to see him sprinkling water on a huge slab of beef, intoning "You were born a steer, you were raised a steer, and now you're a fish."

A Rabbi and a Catholic Bishop were discussing the various proscriptions of their faiths. "Have you, Rabbi, ever violated a religious proscription?" The Rabbi hesitated for a moment then admitted, "Yes. I have consumed pork." But he continued, "What about you, Father? Have you ever violated a proscription?" The Bishop hesitated for quite a while before admitting, "Yes, when I was a young, newly ordained Priest, I once had a dalliance with a beautiful young parishoner."

The Rabbi responded, "Beats the Hell out of a ham sandwich, doesn't it?"

"Back in the days of mandatory meatless Fridays for Catholics..."This has always given me pause; what, exactly, is the differentiation of the flesh of a fish from that of a typical warm-blooded ungulate?

WTF?

To us heathens, it's all the same, I suppose, with the real difference being in the preparation and protein denaturation over heat. Go figger.

In most of medieval Europe, fish was plentiful and relatively cheap, but farmed meat was too expensive for the peasants to eat very often, and the lords claimed to own all the wild game. So peasants ate fish when they could afford even that much, the middle class and all but the richest clerics ate fish often, and noblemen showed off their wealth with pork and beef, and their power with tables loaded with wild game.

So some Pope decided it would be good for their souls to eat poor folks food once a week. (And it would give a chance for some of that bounty to trickle down to the lower tables where the lesser clergy ate.)

There was another reason for eating fish occasionally, although I doubt the medievals ever suspected it: in some parts of Europe, I think including Italy, the soil is quite deficient in iodine. If you only ate the products of that soil - vegetable, wild game, and domesticated meat - you would suffer from thyroid problems due to a lack of enough iodine. But the iodine isn't gone, it just washed out to sea, and eating a little fish would clear that problem up.

How bad did it get? The first symptom of iodine deficiency is goiter, a swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck. Historians have deduced from old portraits and accompanying commentaries that at one time, not only was goiter common among those rich enough to hire a portrait painter, but a little goiter was considered a sign of beauty. That is, the women of the rich and powerful were considered beautiful, so if they had goiters, goiters were beautiful. (Sort of like anorexia and Hollywood, eh?)